Tek CSA7404/TDS7000 repair project (Upgraded memory/CPU)

[Jwalling]

Thanks the tip. I was hoping it wouldn't that difficult. Darn.
I will remove the case and see what the indicator says. Will keep you posted.
Happy Holidays!
 

One thing to try and easy as well - disconnect the CD-ROM data cable. It could cause problems on the ATAPI bus.
Another thing - I don't remember whether DMA should be anabled in the BIOS for IDE devices. If it's set to enabled, try setting it to PIO mode.

What is the serial # of your unit? I may have a Ghost image...

Lastly, if running the scope with all the covers off, make sure you direct a fan over the ACQ board!!!

Jay

[Gandalf_Sr]

If I buy a TDS/CSA8000 that won't boot at all, is there any way of getting hold of a replacement disk drive image?

[matyco]

If I buy a TDS/CSA8000 that won't boot at all, is there any way of getting hold of a replacement disk drive image?

http://www.jvgavila.com/csa8000.htm

[jaywye]

Hi Jay (Jwalling),

I have found a system restore CDs for my TDS7404. I did a system restore, and it seems that the physical media has failed. So, I am going to replace the hard drive soon.

In the meantime, if anyone needs a system restore CD for their TDS7000 series scope, let me know. I should be able to help.

Thanks,
-jeremy- 

[TiN]

I had some CD images too:

TekScope_Opt_App_071-1078-25_063-3478-25
TekScope_Opt_App_1.0.10_071-1883-01_063-3914-10

Did not install these myself, but should be legit. (I just installed standard Win2000, installed TekScope software, drivers, and that's it, it worked from then).

[wastrix]

I had repaired and upgraded a TDS7104 using the excellent info on this thread. It has been working perfectly for months, but just yesterday a very strange fault occurred.

When the record length is set <= 2000 samples, everything works perfectly. As soon as I set the record length > 2000 samples, all the traces simply disappear and the scope responds very slowly to changes in settings. The Windows UI and front panel LEDs etc are still responsive, but the trace and trigger markers move very slowly.

Weirdly, slightly larger record lengths (up to 5000 as far as I can tell) appear partially when I enable horizontal zoom. (See attached picture for a screenshot of this behaviour - notice the trace is invisible in the top window). Without zoom enabled the trace is invisible.

Enabling FastAcq also induces the same fault symptoms.

The fault first occurred when I was using the scope as normal, record length was some large value. Suddenly all the traces froze and the scope became unresponsive. I rebooted and it is now permanently as I described.

I have tried restoring default settings, reinstalling the TekScope software and using an old, previously working hard drive. This has made no difference. Diagnostic test returns all pass, supply voltages all good, NVRAM battery is fresh.

I am running Windows XP with a SU810 motherboard, which I upgraded from the original Bl440ZX/Win98, but it has been working perfectly with this configuration for months.

It almost seems to me like some kind of display rendering issue when there is more than a certain number of points on the screen. Don't know what to make of that though...

I can't make any sense of this. Has anyone else seen this problem? Does anyone have any ideas for how to even begin troubleshooting this? I'd be very grateful for any ideas.

[andy2000]

I'm still working on my TDS7404B with a powerPC board that seems to be stuck in reset.  I was given a tip that it stays in reset until the driver is loaded.  Can anyone confirm this?  The original drive boots, but it's definitely got some problems.  Windows 2000 is running very sluggishly, and it won't shut down fully.  I'm going to attempt a clean Windows install, but if anyone has the TDS7000B OS restore disc and would be willing to share a copy, I would prefer that. 

If my TDS5054 is any predictor, doing a clean installation and getting the drivers to install properly is difficult or impossible.  Every time I've tired with that scope, I get various device conflicts, code 10's and a non working scope.  Fortunately, I have a working image for the TDS5000. 

[TheSteve]

Joined the TDS7000 club! A very kind friend offered up a TDS7104 that has a few issues and is beyond disgusting inside(so much brown dirt not a single part # on a chip is readable). The BNC's on the front are also green in color with corrosion. Supposedly it came from a motherboard manufacturer in Taiwan.
The nvram powercap battery is dead of course but it seems I also need a new nvram so I ordered one tonight:

romPost: PERFORMING NV-MEMORY WALKING-ONE  TEST...

Expected Value: 0x00000001
Actuall Value: 0x00000000
Location: 0xFD0E0000
romPost: NV-MEMORY Walking-one test failed.

Oh the joys of windoze 98 and 128 mb of ram - at least that part boots fine. Assuming it all starts working I'll looking mb, HD and OS upgrades.

[Jwalling]

Joined the TDS7000 club! A very kind friend offered up a TDS7104 that has a few issues and is beyond disgusting inside(so much brown dirt not a single part # on a chip is readable). The BNC's on the front are also green in color with corrosion. Supposedly it came from a motherboard manufacturer in Taiwan.
The nvram powercap battery is dead of course but it seems I also need a new nvram so I ordered one tonight:

romPost: PERFORMING NV-MEMORY WALKING-ONE  TEST...

Expected Value: 0x00000001
Actuall Value: 0x00000000
Location: 0xFD0E0000
romPost: NV-MEMORY Walking-one test failed.

Oh the joys of windoze 98 and 128 mb of ram - at least that part boots fine. Assuming it all starts working I'll looking mb, HD and OS upgrades.

By any chance, is your NVRAM the one with the snap cap battery and in an SMD package? I just repaired a TDS7404 that was failing the walking one test. It's not the first time I've replaced one of these chips either; last year I replaced one in a CSA8000. If you're feeling brave, you can replace the SRAM on the underside, I believe. Cost is only a couple of bucks instead of $50 or more. I haven't tried this method yet, but I kept the defective chips and the next time this comes up I'm going to attempt this instead.

Jay

[TheSteve]

Yes, it is the snapcap SMD package. I have already ordered it and it has been shipped so I am getting one either way. For other people with the same problem it appears swapping it has fixed the problem. Swapping out some ram at the same time may not hurt though.

[Jwalling]

Yes, it is the snapcap SMD package. I have already ordered it and it has been shipped so I am getting one either way. For other people with the same problem it appears swapping it has fixed the problem. Swapping out some ram at the same time may not hurt though.

I'm beginning to think that Dallas/Maxim had a lot code problem with these. My defective one that failed the walking ones test is marked:
DS1245YP-100
0035GC
120052
Philippines

Now that I think of it, I also replaced one in the last several years that would draw excess current on the battery when in standby mode. I mentioned it in this thread, I believe. What are the markings on your bad chip, if I may ask?

Jay

[TheSteve]

Yes, it is the snapcap SMD package. I have already ordered it and it has been shipped so I am getting one either way. For other people with the same problem it appears swapping it has fixed the problem. Swapping out some ram at the same time may not hurt though.

I'm beginning to think that Dallas/Maxim had a lot code problem with these. My defective one that failed the walking ones test is marked:
DS1245YP-100
0035GC
120052
Philippines

Now that I think of it, I also replaced one in the last several years that would draw excess current on the battery when in standby mode. I mentioned it in this thread, I believe. What are the markings on your bad chip, if I may ask?

Jay

Mine is:

DS1245YP-100
0131HH
301963
Philippines

I notice this one has a Dallas DS13D12 non-volatile controller on it as well as the ram chip. The newer ones look to only have a single chip. My replacement should be here Saturday.

[TheSteve]

New (but very old stock) nvram arrived today. It was made in 2002 so it should feel right at home in the scope. Did the NVRAM programming and powered the scope up. It booted as expected and all looked good until I tried the horizontal control. It was 99% dead, 100 rotations might get it to change one time. This was actually a bit of a relief as there was a sharpie written "X H" written above the channel 1 input. I had feared it meant channel 1 was bad but it obviously indicated the horizontal control was bad. I removed the horizontal rotary encoder and carefully opened it up. I polished the silver traces with an eraser, cleaned with alcohol and reassembled. It is as good as new! All self tests pass as does SPC. So it seems all of the basic hardware is now working fine. There is still hours more work cleaning the unit. I have already spent more then an hour with a compressor cleaning the boards. Even 80 PSI wasn't enough to get the dirt/debris off the boards. I had to lightly brush them as well. I normally use an ESD safe vacuum to clean boards but it was pointless. The LCD screen is also separated from the touch screen panel so I need to reattach them and hopefully get the alignment better. Right now the touch screen is a good 5 mm off in the horizontal direction.

So far I am very pleased. I will be ordering an SSD, 512 megs ram for the each of the boards and a faster CPU. The parts are so cheap it is totally worth it. It will also be nice to leave Win98 behind.

[Jwalling]

The LCD screen is also separated from the touch screen panel so I need to reattach them and hopefully get the alignment better. Right now the touch screen is a good 5 mm off in the horizontal direction.

Re alignment: You may already know this, but there should be a touch screen calibration utility on the scope. Usually there's a shortcut on the desktop.

Jay

[TheSteve]

The LCD screen is also separated from the touch screen panel so I need to reattach them and hopefully get the alignment better. Right now the touch screen is a good 5 mm off in the horizontal direction.

Re alignment: You may already know this, but there should be a touch screen calibration utility on the scope. Usually there's a shortcut on the desktop.

Jay

I was thinking there should be a calibration for it, just hadn't looked for it. thank you!

I rebuilt the LCD today as it was falling apart. I removed the LCD and then the touchscreen glass from the LCD. The tape that holds it all together was still good but the foam between the tape had perished. It took a good two hours but I got all of the old tape off and everything clean. I used some automotive body trim double sided tape to reattach the touchpanel and then used some thin foam to keep pressure between the touch panel glass and the aluminum frame. The scope is now100% reassembled and working great. The only option installed is jitter analyzer. Once I rebuild the OS and install XP I will look into enabling further options. I will order a SSD and ram today. I may also order a CPU if I can determine the best one to get.

lastly, having this working means I need some better scope probes. I don't really feel like buying active probes just yet, what do you people recommended for a 500 MHz passive probe?

edit - added a pic of the scope as it is now showing a 60 MHz square wave and the original gross knobs. I didn't take a picture of it before I started but I did take a shot of the front panel knobs after cleaning one of them(and being shocked it cleaned so well). The knobs are a fair representation of how dirty the entire thing was inside and out, the front BNC's were also all green with corrosion. All in all 2 hours for the repair(s) and 12 hours cleaning so far.

edit #2 - ssd, ram and a CPU ordered. Looking into some nice probes for it.

[TheSteve]

Some random info for this thread:

Digikey part # P299-ND is a pretty close match to the battery in the Dallas power cap. To make it fit you just need to bent two tabs 90 degrees and then trim off the excess length.  This is much nicer then trying to solder directly to a battery or paying for an entire new power cap.

I plugged a MS USB wireless mouse into my scope, Win98 found drivers which impressed me. However after installing the USB drivers the scope app could no longer start. I was finally able to get it work again by installing the newest version of the Tek apps. So if you have an older version(I think I had 2.4.2) don't plug any other USB devices in.

Lastly, does anyone have the PC motherboard bios update mentioned as being required for windows 2000 and newer? My board has Main bios version 01.02.07 installed.

[TheSteve]

OK, a full day of struggling but I finally have XP installed and working reliably. I bought ram, a new CPU and an SSD. I had to play around with the ram I bought but eventually got 256mb installed in the powerpc and 512mb for the PC. I bought the same CPU as TiN. If you can do the soldering mods needed on the CPU then you've past micro rework 101 - it was fun but also a challenge.
My biggest problem was that XP would install but then crash or lockup after running for a few minutes. Being I had changed so many parts I had to keep swapping things around to isolate the problem. In the end it was the SSD. I then pulled the SSD out and tried it in my desktop and it worked perfect. I tried installing XP a few more times but it always had the same problem. I finally tried formatting it as NTFS instead of FAT32 and now it works fine. I can't explain why that should make any difference.

I have a Radisys motherboard and the network driver and video drivers were not included in XP. The network driver is posted in the thread a few pages back - it worked perfect. I also searched for the video driver previously recommended(wxpv251c) and it worked great - I have attached to this post. The front panel, and powerpc driver were downloaded from TiN's site. Once all drivers were installed I installed Tekscope v2.5.5 from the Tek website, it worked fine.
Once it was all up and running I restored the following files from my original harddrive to the vxboot directory:

.sn
.key
and the "CalCons" directory

This restored the serial number, the options key and the SPC settings etc.
Now I will spend some time playing with the various option software and key gen.

If anyone has restored a machine with no original hard drive and hasn't restored their serial # but wants to let me know and I'll create the proper .sn file for you.

price breakdown of the mods:
16 gig Samsung SSD - $30 shipped
256mb x 3 ram - $10 shipped
1.4 GHz CPU - $7 shipped

Now I can finally try out the two new P6139B probes I bought for it.


edit - well crap. The scope is working fine but some of the displayed characters are wrong. Such as it displays the symbol for the british pound instead of the ohm symbol or similar. I assume it is a keyboard/character set or region issue. Has anyone else run into this problem?

[vtp]

edit - well crap. The scope is working fine but some of the displayed characters are wrong. Such as it displays the symbol for the british pound instead of the ohm symbol or similar. I assume it is a keyboard/character set or region issue. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Copy windows fonts from your old harddrive to the new. There are three specific Tek fonts and even the ones from win98 work fine with XP - at least in mine.

I have the same scope but put in SU810 MB. No problems whatsoever with XP other than the fonts initially.

[TheSteve]

edit - well crap. The scope is working fine but some of the displayed characters are wrong. Such as it displays the symbol for the british pound instead of the ohm symbol or similar. I assume it is a keyboard/character set or region issue. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Copy windows fonts from your old harddrive to the new. There are three specific Tek fonts and even the ones from win98 work fine with XP - at least in mine.

I have the same scope but put in SU810 MB. No problems whatsoever with XP other than the fonts initially.

Thank you sir!

I toured through the Win98 drive and located the three Tek fonts. I then installed them on the Win XP install. It told me the fonts were already installed yet after a reboot the proper symbols are now displayed.
I have attached the three fonts for others to use.

[TiN]

Thank you. I had same issue, but never bothered to fix it.

Another issue I have, is that scope dont remeber last settings on power reboot. E.g. it boots with default settings always. Anyone had that? Perhaps bad vxWorks config I have?

[TheSteve]

Thank you. I had same issue, but never bothered to fix it.

Another issue I have, is that scope dont remeber last settings on power reboot. E.g. it boots with default settings always. Anyone had that? Perhaps bad vxWorks config I have?

Hmm. Mine is defaulted at each power on as well. It also did that with the original Win98 HD. I suppose it could be related to the vxworks config but I would have thought it would simply be a config saved on the PC harddrive.

Does anyone's TDS7000 save the last used settings automatically?

[TheSteve]

Felt like playing with some equipment tonight.

On my TDS7104 the 3dB bandwidth looks to be 1.15 GHz. My P6139B (500 MHz rated) probes 3dB point is 700 MHz. The input SWR of the scope channels when set to 50 ohms is 1.2 or less below 1 GHz. I played with the FFT mode of the scope and if I select the right combo of settings it crashes. To show basic carriers up to 2 GHz is works reasonably well though.

[Jwalling]

Felt like playing with some equipment tonight.

On my TDS7104 the 3dB bandwidth looks to be 1.15 GHz. My P6139B (500 MHz rated) probes 3dB point is 700 MHz. The input SWR of the scope channels when set to 50 ohms is 1.2 or less below 1 GHz. I played with the FFT mode of the scope and if I select the right combo of settings it crashes. To show basic carriers up to 2 GHz is works reasonably well though.

Are there any minidump files in C:\WINDOWS\Minidump?
Are you running the latest Tekscope application version 2.5.5?

I don't know whether this may apply to XP based TDS7054/TDS7104, but worth a look:
http://www.tek.com/oscilloscope/tds7054-software/windows-oscilloscope-virus-and-patch-update

Jay

[TheSteve]

I don't think it is really the PC scope app that is crapping out as much as either the powerPC board or acquisition board. It only happens when I am trying to see a low frequency FFT with a low RBW and really start messing with the sample rate and resolution. I was able to get it to crash with the original Win98 install as well. I don't plan to use the scope as a spectrum analyzer anyway, I have better ones in the lab already. The documentation from Tek really talks about how good the spectral analysis is though so I wanted to see what they thought all the hype was about.

[Jwalling]

I don't think it is really the PC scope app that is crapping out as much as either the powerPC board or acquisition board. It only happens when I am trying to see a low frequency FFT with a low RBW and really start messing with the sample rate and resolution. I was able to get it to crash with the original Win98 install as well. I don't plan to use the scope as a spectrum analyzer anyway, I have better ones in the lab already. The documentation from Tek really talks about how good the spectral analysis is though so I wanted to see what they thought all the hype was about.

Fair enough, but if there are any minidumps, I could analyze them to see what's crashing.

Jay